Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Jeff Long’s ‘The Descent’ is a good book and very good if
you play RPG’s. You should read it.

Long subscribes to the Neal Stephenson school of writing.
If he has a good idea during writing, he puts it in the book. If there is no room, add more pages. This lead to books with lots of stuff. Stuff may be frowned on in some
literary circles. Fullness is not really respected as an artistic choice. But
we don’t need to care about that.

It has at least two campaigns and one adventure in it,
probably more. I will now proceed to ruin it for you. So if you believe me when
I say you should read it then stop reading now because what follows will fuck
up an otherwise pleasant experience. Only keep reading if you are sure you are
not going to read the book and you just want the RPG-able elements cut out like
a clumsy butcher. Of if you didn’t believe the first part?

Last chance, stop now...

Campaign One

Profiling the Devil

The PC’s are brought into a search. The subtlety of the
introduction depends on the skill of the DM and the motivation of the players.

Someone is trying to profile Satan. Who is a real dude that
you could actually meet. Not a supernatural force. This person, or group, needs
your help. They think the devil walks the earth and no-one believes them. They
are willing to pay.

You do this by finding evidence the devil left behind,
recording and collecting it. You may invade ancient sites, break into vaults
beneath the Vatican to raid its secrets, seek out warlord in the darkest
corners of the earth who say they have a contract with the devil, assaulting an
orphanage where the cellars lead into the caves beneath and guards ring the
outside to prevent whatever is inside escaping.

So the PC’s mission after mission, find all this stuff,
they piece it together. If they didn’t believe in it to begin with they
certainly will now.

An immortal genius banished to the underworld. A brilliant
leader, politician, strategic genius, liar, demagogue, master of disguise,
sometimes able to change his shape, or at least inhabit new bodies over the
years.

Someone who has lead great and terrible empires stretching
back into pre-history. Someone who has managed to hide or destroy almost all
evidence that they exist. You don’t know what they look like or where they are.
You are hired to build a psychological profile of the devil. The face and name
may change, but the patterns of behaviour may not, and these could be valuable
weakness if you intend to fight him.

Creating and secreting devil-evidence would be a
pleasurable piece of campaign prep I think.

Then, they realise something is wrong. Someone is following
their footsteps. Witnesses die in accidents. Sites are smashed, carvings
broken, museums burn. You try to warn the people who hired you that the devil
is on their trail, but you arrive too late to save them. Then someone starts
hunting you.

(The secret is that your employer is the man he hired you
to find. He used you to trace all evidence of his existence, then destroyed it
behind you. How and when and if the PC’s work this out is up to them)

The expedition has two leaders. The billionaires nephew, a
soft-faced Creep. And a HardCase General played by Stephen Lang.

The expedition will be supplied by dwarven mega-drills
dropping supply pods at specific points along your journey as specific times.
Get there too late and the underdark dwellers will get the stuff, or you will
have to fight them for it.

The Creep is laying a series of ‘message transmitters’
during the expedition which can be used to call for help in an emergency. They
can only be used once and he will refuse to activate them in anything but
apocalyptic circumstances. Only he has the magic doohicky that activates them.

In fact the ‘transmitters’ release a deadly plague that has
been created to kill every living thing that has not specifically been
inoculated against them. Only he has been inoculated. Billionare bastard guy
means to de-populate the Underdark and turn it into a new empire for him only.
If this guy ends up in enough trouble, he will use the device to kill
everything. Up till that point he will keep you alive as he needs you to get
out.

Hardcase General is slowly going insane. You will carve
your way through the dark at the head of an army. Half way through, as the
supplies get low, he will leave the porters to be consumed. It is evident that
this was part of the plan from the beginning. A week after that he will abandon
thescholars at the shore of an
underground sea, taking all the rafts. A week after that, the remains of his
army will be cornered in the ruins of an abandoned city and crucified by the
dwellers of the Underdark.

A body. Naked, male and dead.In the lotus position, facing the light from
the entrance.Normal human, went missing
40 years ago. Has tattooed over his body, by him, his life story, tales of
enslavement, adoption and conversion by an underground race. Across his chest,
from nipple to nipple ‘my name is Isaac’

Idiots start to go missing. PC’s investigate and find, in
order of dept-

-Trail of gold coins, ancient, different kinds from
different ages, clearly left in place for many years, evenly spaced, leading
into the darkness, very obviously a trap.

- Abandoned idiots gone crazy.

-Bits and pieces of idiots

-Blood sprays on white stone

-Leathered remains of ancient army of famously dangerous
warriors, hung and dried above an abyss.

-Undisturbed sand mandalas of deep complexity.

-Death

Isaac wasn’t dead. And he’s not on your side.

And all the other bits and pieces I can
remember right now

Giant pile of war dead from an awful massacre. PC’s hired
to guard the pile as is evidence of terrible crime and may be covered up.
Something is disturbing the dead and carrying them away. No tracks. Its burrowing
up from below.

Plume of nitrogen from mass grave so thick it kills birds
and rots trees. Suffocated investigators. Down helicopters by stopping the
engines.

Ancient city, terracotta army. Channels of mercury and
phosphorescent stuff. Tall thin tower in the centre. Climb the tower, just
enough room for one person to stand up. Meditate without passing out and the
mercury and dye lines resolve into a 3d map of the Anticontinent. The earth
crust under the ocean, seen from below. Showing the reach of a lost empire.

An archeo-site exposed by a terrorist blast, illegal to
investigate but can only do so so long as a war rages around.

A corrupt hospital for the aged poor. A deamon girl who
hunts there, chewing the soft tissue from the feet and calves of the terminally
ill and bewildered. The girl still less evil than the hospital authorities.

A nation declaring war on hell.

An elevator to the underdark that can drive you insane.

A underground lost city slowly being consumed by flowstone.
Obsidian towers breeching the white rock. At its centre, and untranslatable
library of forgotten knowledge.

Osteocysts. Going underground for long periods changed your
physiology. It poisons you or wakes up old genetics. You grow horns and get
generally weird. So if your nation declares war on hell, you end up with a lot
of freaky veterans.

Saturday, 27 April 2013

I like my space knight. He is a little bit stiff and a little bit shallow. Not much sense of the numinous. This means we have to see brief glimpses of a deep and tragic faith through the casual behaviours of a rather quotidian man who happens to belong to it, which is a nice tension to play.

And when I say inventing I mean I have been
trying to come up with cool things to say and got carried away and invented, or
deepened and least, a made-up religion. As usual I started writing and just
kept going till I ran out.

Pendragon is full of Christianity which is fine
and appropriate because it’s Pendragon. Our Pendragon is on Mars, so, as extra
faiths we get Mars-Worship, kind of like animist worship of the planet itself,
and Ancestor Worship, which I imagine as a bit like Science-Confucianism.

Except our ancestors actually built Mars, it’s
biosphere at least. A better excuse for worship. Now they are gone and we
remain.

I think whatever happened to western culture after rome fell and we had to walk around for centuries knowing that we could dig art out of the ground that was better anything we could make. Whatever Ibn Khandun means when he talks about the monuments of the ancients and says that 'we cannot even pull down their ruins' to steal the materials. We lack the capacity even to scavenge what they left behind. Whatever that means, whatever it does to a culture to live through that. This would be worse.

I think our symbol looks a bit like this.

So I started with an Oath. It’s always good to
oath something.

"Red earth break these bones

Green sea drown this tongue

Black sky and all your stars

Fall forever on Mars

Should I fail this trust

As I live, it shall be done"

Some one-liners for as-and-when swearing stuff.

"By the wounds of science!

By the ancient hand of man!

By the dreaming Fathers of Mars

Sky Mother forgive me

Dreaming Fathers hear me now!

By the Eye of Earth"

Because it is like an eye, visible in the night
sky as a distant bright dot in the same way Mars is to us now. Except they know
that humanity came from there. And isn’t going back. That’s a lot to think
about looking at a light in the sky.

I kind of made Earth the feminine principal in
Mar Ancestor worship. The distant cradle.

And sometimes things go very wrong-

"Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your voice

Your music and your sounds

I hear you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your faces

Your colour and your form

I see you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your language

And lost the tongue of your machines

They hear me not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have failed your creation

The field dies in my path

The sea battles the black sky

And the tempest forgets his course

Old ones I beg your forgiveness."

Then for some reason I started thinking about
love and marriage. It’s Pendragon after all and the Feudal family unit is your
real character.

(All references to books can also count for equivalent
cultural artefacts, paintings, sculpture etc, so long as it makes sense in
context.)

(Elves and Halflings cannot be Kamikaze Librarians, they
are not Punk enough. Elves are Disco, Halflings are Folk.)

1-15 A
dull day out indeed, add 2 skill points if a Specialist, if a
Dwarf, either roll a d10 for hitpoints, or add one skill point to any skill of
your choice.

16-30 RAAAAAGGGHH!!!
Either +1 to hit (continual) or
attacks equal to your level for one fight per game or one extra move action whenever you like, so long as you use it
to get into melee combat with something bigger than you.

31-50 I
have a book on that… Name a book, its contents and subject. You own
it. Once per game you can use it to add your level to a roll regarding
something relevant to the subject of the book.

51-52 Bookzerker. If a
book (or equivalent cultural artefact) is in immediate danger of destruction,
then you gain +1 to hit AND +1 attack AND +1 move action for each item that is
threatened, up to 1/2 your level (rounding up . So a level 10 bookzerker gets
+5 things they can do and can decide each as they wish. Only in effect while
the item is in danger. (If you deliberately put it in danger then fucking shoot
yourself, don’t play this class.) If you roll this again, add one to your
totalof actions each time.

53-54“It
belongs in a MUSEUM” Once per fight, as a free action you can grab
an item of cultural/historical significance from someone adjacent to you. No
roll or penalty. (Significance, i.e. A
Sword, no, but The Sword Of The King Of Tazadun, yes.) roll this again and on a dex test they didn’t
notice, 3 times and they definitely didn’t notice plus you get a free move
action.

55-56 Bookclub/
Scrollknife You can roll up any scroll and turn it into an
impromptu D4 weapon Jason-Bourne style. A book likewise. A big book you need
two hands for becomes a d6 weapon, though that is less of a surprise. If it’s a
magic book or scroll then the dice ‘explodes’ on a max roll. Add a die size
every time you roll this result.

57-58 ‘Oh..My… God’The daVinci Mode. This carving on the wall,
detail on the cup, marginal note, the sculptures eyes, concerto’s notation, the
temples alignment, THE RAYS COMING FROM THE STAFF. It breaks the whole thing
open, now you see what’s really going on. Once per game you can talk for
exactly thirty seconds, no more, without pause or prep, about some detail you
have found and how it REVEALS EVERYTHING. If the DM and players buy it, then
can re-write reality equivalent to a limited wish spell. It must make sense in
the context of the game.

59-60 Alexandrian
Fire Brigade. You are really good at stopping things (and
people) being on fire very very quickly. Books, buildings, city states. It
scales up if you have the time and resources.Roughly one second for a painting or book,Takes about 10 seconds per
man-sized-mass-equivalent.

61-62 Curatorial
Expertise. You can tell when any organised group of physical things
is out of place or other than it should be given the system in which it is
arranged. Books in a library, statues in a row, paintings in a gallery, knives
in a cupboard. There must be five or more things. Time taken to inspect is
relative to the size of the grouping. It tells you nothing else about the
thing, what it is or why it is there. Not people, unless they are arranged like
objects to an abstract logic. The assassin in a dancehall, no, one of the red
queens playing-card guards, yes.

63-64 An
Angel of Formaldehyde. Give you a jar big enough and a solid place
to stand and you could pickle the world. You can pickle any dead once-living
thing you find. Assuming you have a jar big enough and the chemicals. If you take it home, every day of study will
grant you some piece of knowledge about the thing. Up to your level. (Base
expectation is a vulnerability or a +1 to hit or damage). If you only have part
of a thing then it might take you more time or more examinations to works stuff
out proportionate to the chunk that you have. As you increase in level you can
go back to your old specimens and maybe find new things about them.

65-66 An
Axe to Smash the Face of Time. Time is the enemy of Librarians, a book is a
stony dam in the torrent of Lethe, a museum is like the Hoover Dam. If carrying
an Axe in Tragic circumstances (i.e. witness to things being subject to
inevitable loss) then you may enter a screaming fit and hew your Axe into the
face of Chronos. Chronos is currently incarnated,( in the manner of Moby Dick)
as the people/things pissing you off at this particular moment. (It’s an Ahab
thing). The Axe will wipe their memories. By smashing their fucking brains out
of their head. Every blow is to the head of humanoid enemies, d20 damage each
time. One fight per game. Add one for each time you roll this. Any survivors
suffer amnesia. If you are not carrying an Axe, why not? Not even a small one?
A tomahawk? What kind of librarian are you?

67-68 Five
Thousand Furies in the Teeth of the Gods. You know the names of
5000 furies from scraping for weeks through broken cuneiform script. Well you
sort of know them, you kind of forgot most and they blur a little into one
after a while. If you can point at a person (or intelligent monster) and name
correctly the thing they have done that would enrage the Kindly Ones then the
Fury of that particular act will plunger out of the heavens and fill you with
divine rage. So long as you are trying to kill that particular person. Plus
(=your level) attacks and plus (=your level) damage for each hit so long as you
fight that person. Pass out for minutes =your level after fight is over. Once
per game for every time rolled.

69-70 An
oath of bone, and eye of stone. Your word is as a rock, and
that rock is for caving skulls. You may single out one opponent whose name you
know and describe in sonorous pseudo-celtic or plastic anglo-saxon verse,
exactly how you will kill them in this fight. If you score a critical against
them in this conflict, and if at all possible, the oath comes true. Once per
game per times rolled.

71-72 Raw
Punk Hair. You get a new haircut and it looks punk as fuck. You now
stand out as an opponent of Authority. Anyone who has been oppressed by the Man
will find it hard to distrust you. Anyone working for the Man will peg you
straight on as trouble. (Who the Man is shifts relative to circumstances). Hair
effect disappears with skull shaving or a helmet, but reappears once the hair
grows back or helmet (or hat) is removed. You will not change the hair. Why
would you? +1 CHA to those opposed to authority each roll. No-one suspects you
are a narc.

73-74 Sharp
Motherfucker. You
look like a detective in an off-kilter tv series, a teacher who reads Vice
magazine, a social worker whose sister owns a boutique. Kind of a low-level vaguely beneficial
authority figure who dresses really well. Police will trust you. The mayor
likes you shoes. If you ask about the crime scene people will just assume you
are supposed to know. You going to that thing later? +1 CHA to authority
figures each time, plus no questions at the door. (if you roll both Raw Punk
Hair and Sharp Motherfucker then you will confuse the fuck out of people, you
can decide how people take you, but you better act the part, you also look
amazing).

75-76 Dewy
Decimal Deathsong.As
your life bleeds from you, in a flurry of doomstruck blows you categorise the
fuck out of everything you can see. Add your WIS and INT modifiers together.
When at half hit points or below, you may have this many extra attacks per
round, so long as you (the player) shout the category of each individual thing
you are hitting as you (the character) swing. Once per game. Plus once for
everytime you roll this.

77-78 Flynnsertion. One
per fight, as a free action, you can grab a rope or curtain or chain or
anything like that and freely swing anywhere it could reasonably take you. If
you are swinging into danger, there is no roll involved. If trying to get out
of danger, roll your DEX, unless you are carrying a book away from someone who
shouldn’t have it. Once per fight every time you reroll this.

78-79 ‘lefthanded writer,just ate lunch, hates his mother’You can analyse handwriting, ink types, paper
scars, all kinds of pseudo forensic bullshit. Reading any piece of handwritten
text lets you describe/discover nouns and adjectives equal to your level about
the writer. If you get it wrong (if the identity is already set in game) then
the DM has to give you the correct word.

80-81 We
Have Heard of Those Princes Heroic Campaigns. You remember these
guys from somewhere.. When confronted with a high level noble, king, merchant
house, church, guild or equivalent you can recall the real story as to where
they come from, they source of their power, it rarely what they say it is. The
DM must provide any and all information about this family/organisation. The
information must be at least 100 years old. Once per game per roll.

82-83 Chomskarian
Rhetoric. With an opposed CHA vs WIS roll and a long (an hour at
least) conversation, you can use reductive logic, carefully chosen evidence and
shocking confidence totemporarilyconvince low level members of any group that
EVERYTHNG THEY KNOW IS WRONG. Up is down, black is white, THEY are US. Wears
off after a day or so. Once per game per roll.

83-84 Divine
Mandala Telephone. Pick a god of knowledge or writing from the
setting or from real history. You know them. You don’t necessarily worship
them. They don’t necessarily like you or owe you anything. But you know them
and can contact them by making a complex mandala of special sand (takes d6 –
DEX mod hours and no wind or interruption)

85-90 ‘dammn
my eyes’ Your eyes are fucked, you now need glasses to see. Roll
this twice and your glasses can see one thing normal glasses can’t (Infrared,
ghosts etc) Add one thing for each time you roll this result. Make sure to
clean them carefully after each blood-spattered brainbashing.

94
You actually DO know what you’re talking about. +1 Cha. to racial max, excess goes to
Wis or Int.

95-96 Cartographers
guild party crasher You were at this party, with these map guys,
you think, you were pretty drunk. Anyway they had this map that looked a bit
like where we are now. Probably…Player
can close their eyes and draw, with pencil, and their off hand, one thing on
the DM’s map. It’s probably there, or roughly there. Something like that
anyway. Once per game per roll.

97-98 I
only read the action scenes You actually read a prophecy about this
exact event ages ago somewhere, actually you skipped most of it and you forgot
how it ends but the death scenes were really specific. 2+ save against the next
thing that would have killed you as you suddenly remember what it was. Of
course now the prophecy is useless because you broke it. Once for each reroll.

99-100
Marcus Brody You have a Brody,

an excellent, decent, civilised,
knowledgeable friend at home. They consistently advise you no to go on
adventures. They will never (no matter how much the Dm wants them to) betray
you. If you make it home wounded or broken they will patch you up. They will
look after your stuff while you are not around. If you are captured and they
hear about it they will bravely (and stupidly) set out to rescue you. This
rescue will, amazingly, considering how utterly useless they are at
adventuring, be successful. As soon as you are rescued, the Brody will
themselves be captured by someone horrible. Should you fail to rescue them,
they will be killed. Who’s going to look after your stuff now you self-centred
piece of shit?

And you get this

‘Another piece for
the collection’ You have a place, somewhere, it’s safe. Like a small off
the beaten track museum, library or gallery. You can keep your stuff there
(reasonably) safe from DM interference. Name it.

For each exhibit of a type
(sword, vase, picture, style, era, genre, author, smith.) retrieved and
preserved safely by you. Once per game you may assess any item of that type.
Roll a percentage dice.

-if the first d10 is under the
number retreieved, the price, makup, creator, likely owner and any other
mundane information within reason are known.

-if the 2 d10s, taken as a 2-digit
number, are lower than the total slain, you know EVERYTHING that may be useful
about that item. Including magical effects, strange conspiracies, likelt plot
relavence e.t.c

Identicals or multiple mundane
examples don't count, max is 90, collected after that just goes to bragging
rights at your FLGS.

GMs are free to determine what
constitutes a "type", Librarians are free to bore everyone by buying
endless books in little second hand shops for no reason just to notch up, and
the other players are free to have a little talk with them if they abuse these
rights and perhaps should view them doing so as a nice little red flag.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.